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11/15/2017

I'm saddened that Alabama's image has been damaged by the Roy Moore debacle. My contempt rises when I see him in his stupid cowboy hat and sunglasses, riding that frightened horse.

Once we had another Roy, Roy Rogers, a true cowboy and true Christian gentleman.

Through the years, we've often traveled through Alabama, making the big swerve through Montgomery from I-85 to I-65, and heading south past the Japanese car factories, Indian tribe casinos and fast food places. On the Hank Williams Lost Highway, I've been thankful for the fine Alabama welcome centers and shaken my head at the Alabama Robert Trent Jones golf trail.

Nothing like the lunch buffet at the Pizza Hut in Greenville to replenish a weary traveler, nothing more homey than the boiled peanuts and country music compilations in truck stops, barefoot brides at the checkout counter, and life-size beer company cutouts of Nick Saban. In the changing leaves of fall, deer hunters fill up at country gas stations, rifles slung on their pickup trucks' rear windshields. Near Mobile, a sign proclaims the road to Harper Lee's Monroeville.

The scary soaring bridge at Daphne leads to the wetlands of Mobile, where the Gulf Coast begins. It's an inspiration to salute Mobile's Henry Aaron Stadium, recalling the poverty that Hammering Hank and Willie Mays overcame to achieve baseball stardom. Then it's I-10 west through Gulfport, Pass Christian, Biloxi and Bay St. Louis, the Mississippi casinos and their billboards for faded country stars, and on to Louisiana and home.

With all of its race and sex-drenched politics, Alabama has produced writers like Dianne McWhorter, whose "Carry Me Home" makes me think of W.H. Auden's statement about William Butler Yeats, "Mad Ireland hurt him into poetry." Mad Birmingham hurt her into a testament of love, hate and redemption.

Birmingham's contradictions between repression and populism also inspired George Packer's recollections of his progressive Agrarian grandfather, George Huddleston, a liberal congressman representing Birmingham, defeated by the resurgence of racial politics and Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats after World War II. Packer's book, "The Blood of the Liberals," also gives a heart-rending account of his father's losing his academic career at California's Stanford over 1960s campus protests.

Bull Connor's Birmingham, one of the meanest places on earth, is now a new-economy jewel of trendy restaurants, restored old neighborhoods and recreational trails. Huntsville has the space industry, and Montgomery boasts Hank Williams' grave and a topflight Shakespeare theater.

Of course, there's hell holes like Moore's Gadsen, whose mall where he allegedly cruised for teenage girls sounds like the setting for a dystopian zombie apocalypse. Phenix City, the old haunt of the Dixie Mafia, is another place that time has passed by. Nearby, there's Tuskegee, home of George Washington Carver and the Tuskegee Airmen, and Auburn, whose football ethos and old-South frat culture exist along with cutting-edge agricultural and scientific research.

The state's wealth of music. The Delmore Brothers. Hank. Muscle Shoals, where Wilson Pickett and the Stones cut pioneering albums, backed by that great home-grown horn and rhythm section, and where Duane Allman developed his blues runs. Sorry, Neil, I even love "Sweet Home Alabama," and that eponymous group whose "Merry Christmas From Dixie" helps make the holidays.

Alabama's effort to atone for its violent past is symbolized by the Senate candidacy of Doug Jones, who after years of the state's silence prosecuted two Klansmen for the bombing murders of four little girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, a cornerstone of McWhorter's classic. Alabama's primitive past echoes in Moore's campaign, with its fraudulent claims to religion and law.

11/10/2017

In recent weeks, I've read a number of reviews about new renditions of Homer's "The Illiad" and "Odyssey" and Virgil's "The Aeneid."

The critic Daniel Mendelsohn caught the enthusiasm for ancient stories with his memoir "An Odyssey, A Father, a Son and an Epic." Published last September, the book relates how Mendelsohn and his father gained new understanding of each other when the father monitored Mendelsohn's course at Bard College on "The Odyssey."

The Sunday New York Times magazine last week ran Wayne Mason's effusive profile of Emily Wilson, whose "Odyssey" will soon appear. The daughter of English historian and biographer A.N. Wilson, known for changing teams from atheists to believers, Wilson is the first woman to translate "The Odyssey." She's not the first to do Homer though - Caroline Alexander joined the long list of "Illiad" translators in 2016.

Poet April Bernard in the current New York Review of Books praises David Ferry's new translation of "The Aenied," although I didn't find anything that special in the passages she cited.

Bernard values Ferry's deft handling of meter in his blank verse lines while finding Robert Fagles' much lauded version of a few years ago too loose in its free verse. But Bernard extols another oft-praised translator, Robert Fitzgerald, who like Fagles got around to many of the classics. Bernard also finds space to tweak John Dryden for his translation from the 17th century.

The New York Review also recently ran a positive review of new Illiads by classicist Peter Green, who got around to his work nearing age 90, and Barry Powell. The reviewer found both translations worthy, with strengths and weaknesses. I plan to try the Green book, having enjoyed his reviews for many years in the London Review of Books.

Mason's New York Times magazine profile of Wilson overpraised Wilson for her translation of a Greek word that ambiguously describes the hero Odysseus as "turned" or "turning." Mason acclaims Wilson's brilliance for translating the term as "complicated," which fails to indicate Odysseus' reputation as a devious trickster.

Along with Fagles and Fitzgerald, Richard Lattimore is remembered as an exemplary translator of the classics. Going further back, the club includes Alexander Pope, and George Chapman, the first English translator of Homer, whose work so thrilled Keats.

As conventional wisdom claims the diminishment of publishing, it's encouraging that ancient texts receive such love. Translations arrive almost as frequently as new books, reflecting the poverty of today's literary imagination.

Who keeps reading - and buying - all of these translations? Perhaps they are mostly for whatever colleges courses still feature dead, somewhat white, male writers. A slice of readers must keep devouring the same stories over and over in different translations.

The audience for contemporary poetry is small. Readers show they love traditional rhythms, like Ferry's. Years ago, poetry stopped being used for long narratives, with a few exceptions. The continual wave of classics, along with translations of Dante, indicate a hunger for long-form verse.

The ancient stories, still mined by Hollywood, give basic emotions of heroism, adventure, travel, sex, family, mercy and war. They'll reach us until the last human voice falls silent.

11/09/2017

Soprano Audrey Luna has added another achievement: hitting the A note above high C on the musical scale.

Luna carries out the apparently unprecedented feat in the Metropolitan Opera's production of Thomas Ades' "The Exterminating Angel," based on Spanish director Luis Bunuel's surrealistic film.

No other soprano in the New York City opera company's 137-year-history has sung that high, according to New York Times writer Zachary Woolfe. Several of the company's sopranos have come close over the years, but reaching the A has never been done, Met archives show.

Luna reaches the high note at the start of the opera, without warmup, Woolfe reported, and hits it again during the performance. Ades, known for challenging singers, wrote the A in the score as a possibility.

A recording of Luna reaching the high A should be sent through the universe. She has taken the human voice where it's never been before.

The team's often zany history stretches across long patches of horrible play broken by the excellence of several teams loaded with talent, who always fell short.

I'm amazed at how many Astros players I can remember from years past, a few of them Hall of Famers, many of them great talents who never fulfilled their potential.

The saddest was J.R. Richard, perhaps the greatest pitching talent ever, felled by a stroke. The Astros had several other tragedies over the years. They traded away players like Rusty Staub, Joe Morgan and Mike Cuellar. They didn't win championships with Randy Johnson, Nolan Ryan, Craig Biggio and Jeff Bagwell. We loved near superstars like Jimmy Wynn, the "Toy Cannon," and Cesar Cedeno.

The 2017 Astros changed the script, displaying fortitude and resilience that reflected Houston's efforts to recover from Hurricane Harvey's devastation. Baseball's grace and despair - reflected in the contrasting faces of George Springer and Yu Darvish -were entangled with the realities of climate change and political turmoil.

Carlos Correa and Carlos Beltran from Puerto Rico. Jose Altuva from Venezuela. The Astros playing for flood-ravaged Houston.

For years, the World Series brought out the best sportswriters from the nation's papers, like the Herald Tribune's and New York Times' Red Smith. With the ravaging of the newspaper and magazine industry, that tradition has faded. I'm grateful for writers like the Washington Post's Tom Boswell, who uphold the tradition and capture the game's timeless beauty.

Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci again showed that he's today's best baseball writer, reaching the heights of past masters like W.C. Heinz. His piece on the Astros' 5-1 victory Wednesday night in the World Series' seventh game is loaded with great baseball quotes. Seventh game pitching hero Charlie Morton's resurgence with the Astros is an inspiring story of determination that Verducci tells with depth and insight all the more impressive considering that he wrote it after serving as a Fox Sports commentator.

With Willie Nelson's "Bloody Mary Morning" running through my mind, I'm replaying scenes from the Astros' wins over Boston, the New York Yankees and the Dodgers. One of my favorite World Series memories will be the young Astros fans wearing Dallas Keuchel beards.

I envy those kids. They saw the Astros win a championship without having to wait 56 years.

11/01/2017

NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle awarded New Orleans its pro football franchise on All Saints Day 1966.

The Saints, whose owners threatened to move the team to another city over the years, is now an "interwoven part" of the old French city, as The Times-Picayune noted Wednesday.

The newspaper featured the Saints for its excellent "300 for 300" series on New Orleans' history. The series marks the 300th anniversary of the city's founding.

The column notes that the Saints played their home games at old Tulane/Sugar Bowl Stadium for seven years before the completion of the Louisiana Super Dome. Built in 1926 on Willow Street on Tulane's campus, the deteriorating structure was torn down in 1980 for Tulane student housing and other buildings.

Beginning play in 1967, the early Saints were owned by John Mecom, a Texas oilman who displayed little understanding of pro football. Sen. Russell Long and Congressman Hale Boggs helped the NFL get an antitrust exemption to ease the merger with the AFL, leading to New Orleans receiving the franchise over cities like Seattle and Cincinnati, as the Picayune details.

The choice wasn't so far-fetched; in 1966 New Orleans still was considered the South's leading city over Atlanta and Houston. During New Orleans' economic and social decline, the Saints held on despite years of futile play. The team was known as the home of clueless coaches and over-the-hill NFL brawlers and drinkers. The drafting of Ole Miss quarterback Archie Manning gave a brief glimmer of respectability, but poor Archie spent most of his career dodging other teams' defensive linemen.

The brick and concrete structure, painted Tulane's deep green, was a vintage old-time stadium where New Orleans characters milled around in florid sport shirts and straw fedoras, shouting in accents similar to Brooklyn's.

A young fan like me could easily buy a good seat from some shady guy with a mustache and sunglasses. I often visited a college friend who lived on Willow Street a few blocks from Tulane, and we'd rise near noon on bright autumn Sundays to walk to the stadium and buy a ticket and see a game.

I also witnessed several Tulane-LSU games at the old stadium. Back then, the Green Wave was still considered LSU's biggest rival, although LSU had moved way beyond its longtime foe. The private school began de-emphasizing football after World War II and left the Southeastern Conference in the 1960s. Still, the Greenies could still shock the Tigers from time to time.

The old stadium was the scene of the Super Bowl in 1970, 1972 and 1975. It also saw historic Sugar Bowls, including LSU breaking the segregated South's ironbound rules by playing an integrated Syracuse team in 1965. LSU won 13-10 although the Orange featured two future NFL stars, Floyd Little and Jim Nance.

LSU also won its first national championship on the field, beating Clemson in the 1959 Sugar Bowl. The next year, LSU lost to Ole Miss in the Sugar Bowl in a replay of the Halloween night regular season game in which Billy Cannon made his famous 89-yard punt return.

After the bitter LSU loss to the Rebels, it was disclosed that Cannon before the game had signed a contract with the Los Angeles Rams below the Tulane Stadium's stands. The Rams exec who signed Cannon was Pete Rozelle. Cannon also signed with the AFL's Houston Oilers, one of the conflicts that led to the pro football merger.

Like other New Orleans lovers, I was thrilled when the Saints won the 2010 Super Bowl, lifting the city from its Hurricane Katrina depression. But part of me will always love the scruffy old Saints, and watching them play beneath a beautiful blue sky at old Tulane Stadium.

10/26/2017

On the day after the 35th anniversary of my father's death in Baton Rouge General Hospital, where I was born in 1951 and received the emergency appendectomy that saved my life in 1953, I heard the news that Antoine Domino had died at age 89. A sweet man, Fats gave us joy and beauty, like sunlight breaking through the clouds.

My sorrow over Antoine was mixed with happiness when after midnight of another St. Crispin's Day, the Houston Astros rose from the mat over and over to beat the Los Angeles Dodgers to even the World Series at one game apiece.

During my boyhood, my father brought home greatest hits albums by Hank and Fats, the foundations of my love for music.

My father took me to my first major league game, the Colt .45s vs. his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, in old day-glo colored Colt Stadium. Backlit by the brutal sun, the Astrodome's structure rose beyond the right field bleachers.

Later, after the Colts changed to the Astros, we flew in a corporate jet to a game in the Astrodome. An awkward teenage boy, I watched my father and his business cronies play cards and drink bourbon in a fog of cigar and cigarette smoke.

New Orleans and Houston are magical places for me, fused together as twin poles of the Gulf Coast culture in which I grew up.

Long steamy nights listening to the Astros on the radio. Trips to Houston and New Orleans with my late friend Loftin for concerts and adventure. Floods and hurricanes and the Saints and the blues.

Fats' death brought back all of those wonderful songs. They were based on New Orleans rhythms and Antoine's Creole voice, but they belong to the world.

10/24/2017

The school board said it took the action because some parents objected to the use of the "N-word" in Harper Lee's novel, which has been required reading for generations of middle school and high school students throughout our home of the brave and land of the free.

Like all good liberals, I feel I should oppose the school board. But much of the vilification of the school board was overblown. The ACLU of Mississippi cried "censorship," although "To Kill a Mockingbird" remains in school libraries. A child can still read the book if he or she wishes. As usual, what constitutes censorship is misunderstood.

I feel I should stand against the removal of books because they bring discomfort to readers. But I can see how black parents could feel about "To Kill a Mockingbird" as they would a Confederate memorial.

The AJC's Bert Roughton condemned the school board's action in a well-crafted Sunday column. Yet, when quoting a passage from "To Kill a Mockingbird," the newspaper eliminated the "N-word." Showing a judgment similar to the school board's, the AJC felt that printing the word would upset readers.

The controversy had me wondering why "To Kill a Mockingbird," written in 1960, is so sacrosanct. Several of those decrying the board's action were aging white males like Roughton, who see "To Kill a Mockingbird" as a safe and acceptable exploration of racism. After 57 years, isn't it time for schools to find fresh new works?

I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" for the first time last year, and found it a very good book, especially the voice of Scout, the young narrator.

But I thought the book weakened by stereotypical characters, especially the white villain. The novel's culminating final scene smacked of lurid melodrama. I was also surprised at the superficiality of the portrait of the noble white attorney Atticus Finch. Along with the black man falsely accused of rape, the novel's strongest black character is the Finch family's maid, hardly an inspiring calling for today's students.

In summary, I found the book overrated as an American classic. A lot of the book's popularity comes from the Academy Award-winning movie made from it, and Gregory Peck's performance as Finch.

Isn't "To Kill a Mockingbird," written in 1960, dated for young readers in the 21st century? Choosing it for class reading is itself censorship by excluding other books. A number of writers, especially black and women, have risen in the decades since the book's publication.

Admittedly, school boards like Biloxi's are unlikely to approve seriously challenging books, but a range of possibilities exist besides "To Kill a Mockingbird." The Biloxi board is supposed to announce a replacement for "To Kill a Mockingbird," so here are a few options:

Black Mississippi writer Jesmyn Ward's 2011 novel "Salvage the Bones" would give Biloxi students a recognizable view of their home territory's black culture. Ward grew up near Biloxi, and the National Book Award-winning book depicted a black family's travails after Hurricane Katrina. Books like Richard Wright's "A Native Son" would also challenge young readers. White parents might object to books by black authors, but black students for generations have been subjected to Harper Lee's vision of black-white relations.

A book by Nobel Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison would broaden the students' perspective. Works by young African writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Zadie Smith would also give them an understanding of a broader world.

Closer to home, Willie Morris' "The Courting of Marcus Dupree" would give young males a strong account of the intersection of sports and race. If the school board wishes to introduce the students to Mississippi's literary heritage, books like William Faulkner's "The Unvanquished" or Eudora Welty's "The Optimist's Daughter" would give the experience of much greater writers than Harper Lee.

While "To Kill the Mockingbird" is a worthy book, I'm uncomfortable with the notion of a school board or any other government entity imposing "acceptable" books on readers. I realize that reading lists and books like "To Kill a Mockingbird" are practical for teaching literature, but such imposed reading limits students' exposure to art and ideas. Beauty and Truth, as Mr. John Keats would have it.

Although I'm sure educators would find the exercise unwieldy, I'd like to see schools allow students to choose their own book or books from a list of say five to 10. That would help them become independent readers. A child would give a report on his or her chosen book, leading a class discussion.

I wouldn't care if the student goes outside of the reading list and chooses a science fiction book or a volume of "Game of Thrones." A nerdy kid discovers Philip K. Dick after watching "Blade Runner 2049?" Fine. Reading is the key.

10/18/2017

I've wondered what New Yorker writer A.J. Liebling would make of the Trump era and its fogs of fake news, Internet sensationalism and social media alarms.

No doubt, Liebling would chronicle old-line print publications like The New York Times, Washington Post and his own New Yorker as they uncover the Trump administration's assaults on American democracy while seeking to survive in the online world of Google, Twitter and Facebook.

Today marks Liebling's 113th birthday, as Garrison Keillor noted in his Writer's Almanac. Born in 1904 in New York City, Liebling died on Dec. 28, 1963, a little over a month after the John F. Kennedy assassination and the beginning of wrenching changes in American society.

Liebling, who pioneered media criticism beginning in the 1940s with his Wayward Press columns in the New Yorker, focused on newspapers, which dominated the news landscape. New York City had seven or more newspapers, and television had not yet become the main source of information. In analyzing New York City's newspapers, Liebling exposed sensationalism, inaccurate and politically slanted reporting and corporate censorship.

Part of the second generation of writers who defined the New Yorker, Liebling had a varied career that seems unimaginable today. Besides his press criticism, Liebling wrote authoritatively about boxing, food and politics. He also rivaled New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell with his features on New York City characters.

Despite his girth, Liebling covered the Normandy invasion in World War II and the allies' liberation of Europe. The French government honored his work as a war correspondent.

Connoisseurs of Louisiana politics like me revere Liebling's portrait of Gov. Earl K. Long in a series of New Yorker articles. Collected in the book "The Earl of Louisiana," the articles vividly portray "Uncle Earl's" heroic political battle in 1959 against Louisiana segregationists, which led to an emotional collapse and Long's death in 1960. Published in 1961, the political classic is a brilliant finale to both men's careers.

Out of many memorable quotes, Liebling's statement "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better" endures as a credo for old-time newspaper reporters.

Liebling is among writers whose work has been entombed by the Library of America. The New Yorker anthology "Just Enough Liebling" reflects his diversity.

Some of his writing is dated, heavy-handed and overly ornate. At his best, Liebling fashioned sentences that flow like a rushing stream and glitter like a sun-lit mountain pool. His words cast light in the darkness.

10/12/2017

A recent trip to Boston uncovered gaps in my Revolutionary War knowledge.

Boston's Freedom Trail, denoted by red bricks meandering along city sidewalks, tells the story of the American colonies' battle for independence from Great Britain. The revolution stirred in Boston and nearby towns with the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party and other flashpoints.

Visits to the Old North Church and Paul Revere's House gave a new understanding of the early days of the revolution. In previous years, we'd visited Lexington and Concord, where the revolution's first shots were fired in April 1775, and the Bunker Hill monument.

I'd forgotten that the revolution began more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. Nathaniel Philbrick's 2013 history, "Bunker Hill: A City. A Siege. A Revolution." tells the story of how the ragged New England militias foiled the British army and navy in a serious of encounters, including the fierce fighting at Charlestown's Bunker Hill in June 1775. The main fighting occurred on the adjacent Breed's Hill.

As Philbrick relates, the New England farmers and tradesmen maintained their loyalty to the British king after the fighting began. They thought of themselves as opposing policies of the king's ministers. It took months for them to turn against the king, and declare full independence.

Another gap in my knowledge was George Washington's taking charge of the nascent American Army in 1775, an important part of Philbrick's narrative. We visited the mansion in Cambridge where Washington established his headquarters from July 1775-April 1776. Washington left for New York after the British evacuated the Boston peninsula in March 1775, ending an American siege.

Now a national historic site that includes a beautiful garden, Washington's house is located on Cambridge's Brattle Street, known as Tory Row before the revolution. Built in 1759, the house was the home of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the late 19th century. An excellent tour of the home emphasizes Longfellow and his family's memorabilia, along with anecdotes about Washington.

Southern boys like me learned about the Civil War with our breakfast Wheaties. The Revolutionary War was all but ignored, outside of Disney's "Johnny Tremain" and "The Swamp Fox," whose jaunty theme song, sung by star Leslie Nielsen, I still remember.

Philbrick's book, and Boston's preserving of its history, show how much of today's America was rooted in the revolution.

10/10/2017

Color TV burst into the nation's living rooms in the early 1960s, along with pro football.

New York Giants quarterback Y.A. Tittle was one of the NFL's stars in those days when autumn Sunday afternoons revealed a game more suited for television than baseball, the established "national pastime."

Looking like an aging sea captain caught in a storm of blitzing linemen, Tittle hurled thunderbolt passes to a pack of Giants receivers, including Frank Gifford, the subject of Frederick Exley's love letter to the Giants, "A Fan's Notes."

Although in that pre-Super Bowl era Tittle's Giants lost three NFL championship games, he eluded blame for those defeats. He was seen as a heroic battler against fate.

His image as a noble warrior was immortalized by Pittsburgh Post Gazette photographer Morris Berman's photo of the dazed, bleeding Tittle after a brutal hit in a game against the Steelers in 1964.

The photo, which hangs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, was taken in Tittle's last season, when the aging Giants declined. Although Tittle suffered a concussion and other injuries from the hit that led to a Pittsburgh interception and touchdown, Tittle was playing the next Sunday.

Tittle's 17-year career marked the last days of the old NFL before the rise of the American Football League and the advent of the Super Bowl. On the day Tittle retired, the Jets with great fanfare announced the signing of Joe Namath, a new kind of NFL quarterback, as The New York Times reported in its Tittle obituary.

A native of Marshall, Texas whom LSU spirited away from the University of Texas, Tittle was an all-SEC performer for LSU and the MVP of the 1947 Cotton Bowl, known as "the Ice Bowl." LSU tied Arkansas 0-0 on the frigid field in Dallas despite dominating the Razorbacks throughout the game. Rabalais said that Tittle told him that the "Ice Bowl"was the coldest game he ever played, even more so than NFL games in Green Bay, Chicago and New York.

After his NFL days, Tittle built a successful insurance business in the San Francisco area. Before coming to the Giants, he played for the '49ers.

Title returned to Tiger Stadium in 2014, amazed at the expansions made to the the old arena. The luxurious players' locker room, the large-screen scoreboard, and the 100,000-plus seats soaring skyward marked a different world from the primitive horseshoe in which he played.

The aged warrior, suffering from dementia, was one of those who laid the foundation for LSU football. He was a great NFL player, and a great Tiger.